Art Pact 114


All the razor-glass sounds shattering in his ear, the day-glo noise of the tumbling books covers, rushing noises and words and the faces of the dead and never-to-be-alive, he swam up towards the surface of nothing, gasping for a breath that he knew could never fill his lungs, the bloodthirsty fish picking at his skin, tearing away the old dead parts of his brain that weren't necessary any more, the grey dead bits thrown into shadow by the bright light of the drug. Now he was swimming down, no transition, no flip or inversion or turn or roll or yaw or pitch just down when he had been swimming up, down into the bright depths, down to the rushing tides that swirled up, rainbow currents that lit up sadness and happiness and curiosity and made him feel as though he were falling in a hundred directions at once even as he swam.

Where am I going to? he thought to himself, and then another thought that was in another language, something he understood at the time but could never write down later, that he knew as he thought it was profound and untranslatable, something that the drug had loosened in his head. He was swimming through thoughts, he knew that, but he was not swimming in a physical sense, because his legs and arms were anaesthetised, leaden and swollen and slow as an old man frozen in the height of midwinter, but somehow he was moving down through the layers and thermoclines of ideas, dipping deeper and deeper, and the motion was like a fish's somehow, so that the word swimming made sense, it was an undulating motion that he could feel somehow against his flanks, a buzzing bursting fizzing tide that swept on his skin, on where his ancestors' lateral lines must have been.

He tried to think back to his reasons for being here, in the underside of this garish dreamscape. There was something he had had to do, something that had led to him crouching in the changing room, hyperventilating in time with the sounds of the Christmas crowds outside, the bags of baubles sat around his ankles while he waited, panicking, for the sound of the attendant that he knew must have seen him come in, must even now be paging someone from security to come down to the women's fitting area as soon as possible to throw out a pervert. The hypodermic was in his hand, and he'd stared at it, trying to ignore the rushing noise of conversation, the festive music piped in everywhere, the undiluted sound of the old continent of tradition and religion and family subducting under the upstart plate of commmercial greed. He'd thought that there was time to find some answers the old way, to find the others, perhaps. But it had come on him like a rush, like an empty face glimpsed in the crowd, a blank hole in the air where eyes and a mouth should have been, eyes that he knew nonetheless were looking at him, a mouth that was unseen but which was saying his name, calling him in. So he'd rushed through the bodies, pushing people aside and leaving a trail of new dissatisfaction in his wake that rippled outwards, a physical anger to overlay the spiritual malaise and weariness that the shop was full of. He'd needed somewhere private, somewhere he wouldn't be disturbed, and he'd seen the changing room attendant take a middle-aged woman down into the depths of the corridor between the little cubicle. His chance, to grab a doorhanger and duck into the nearest empty cubicle, to throw himself down on a seat and let his new belonging spill around his feet. He'd fumbled out the little leather case then, fingers stupid with terror failing repeatedly to grab onto the tag of the zipper until finally they caught it, pulled it open, and he was able to get out the syringe. Only when it was in his hand, the needle tip just about to stab into his arm, had he sobered for a second, long enough to draw it back and consider where he would go to find the truth. That was the last thing he remembered, then swimming down. Somewhere in that dead zone, that dark space, he'd grabbed at a question, he must have, there would have been no point in doing otherwise, but he could not find where he had left it. The question was in one of the grey areas of his brain, and they had already been eaten away by the fish (or were they fish?) that swam with him.

He grasped for it, lights out of his reach, that he could half see, half feel. Ribbons twisting, jigging, flipping around and about, luminous lures on the end of great concepts that reached off into the darkness, and now thinking that he suddenly felt fear again, a terror that these ideas were just that, pretty glitter bait that would distract him from the real question he was trying to ask himself, that at the darkness at the other end of those lines was a mouth all teeth that he could not see, eyes that watched him mercilessly, something that was large and brutish and subtle and small all at the same time, overpowering and insidious, that would swallow him up if he made the wrong choice, throw him out back into the world he'd come from, perhaps, where the rest of the terror was waiting for him.

He shied away from those lights, that danced like sea creatures but were just traps, he shied back and kept swimming down, his arms now feeling free but his lungs full of a cold wet lead, a heaviness that was going to crush him. Here, down here was the question, the one that had sent him running into the changing room, the one that he'd lost in the space between taking the drug and now. The question was simple, but it led directly to another.

Where had the children gone to? And why had they come back?

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